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Microsoft Extends XP For Low-Cost Laptops
Ian Lamont writes "Microsoft says it will extend the sales of Windows XP Home to OEMs by several years, but it's not in response to the SaveXP petition. Microsoft is supposedly making the move in part to ensure that Linux doesn't dominate the market for certain types of 'ultra-low-cost' laptops. XP will be available for OEMs until June 30, 2010, or one year after the availability of the next client version of Windows, whichever date comes later. This greatly extends the earlier XP deadline of June 30 of this year (which was an extension itself), and means XP will potentially be installed on new computers nearly a decade after its original release. The author of the article suggests that the post-June 2008 release of Atom-based laptops encouraged Microsoft to extend XP, even though Intel says Atom can support Vista. Intel also claims that 'Moblin' Linux will be available on Atom-equipped mobile devices starting this summer."
"Can support Vista" and "Can support Vista for 5 minutes" are the same!
It seems that Microsoft made the decision to extend XP based on an attempt to prevent manufacturers switching, after previously ignoring pleas from the end-users to extend XP. The issue seems to be that they're more interested in selling software (such as Vista) even to people who don't want it than they are in selling software to people who do want it; Vista helps to drive the upgrade train, and XP doesn't, so until the low-cost laptops came off the ground continuing XP would presumably have been seen as a huge evil from Microsoft's point of view. It's the manufacturers that Microsoft are trying to please, not the manufacturer's customers (note that retail versions of XP will no longer be available), and only because they had a real alternative (Linux in this case); this strategy may end up backfiring in the long term, because if retailers are prevented from listening to their customers as long as they stay with Microsoft, they may eventually have enough incentive to change, so as not to lose revenue.
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Developers: We can use your help.
... to see a 7 years old OS making the news because it will be extended to 10 years! It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010. I mean it works, but I wouldn't define it as an achievement of human progress. Just because the model T was built for twenty years doesn't mean that all other innovation and progress came to a grinding halt.People know how to use XP, and how to fix it when it's broken. Who needs an upgrade?
"It's all just meme meme around here"
"It's like saying Ford extending the life of their 1965 sedan into the 2010."
Not really.
Software isn't hardware, and just because the public is groomed to accept drastic OS changes doesn't mean that we need to replace systems that work sufficiently well for their intended purpose. Refinement instead of replacement can avoid all sorts of problems such as, well, Vista. Given the MSFT market share, they could have gradually improved XP and made even more money than they have by dumping capital into Vista.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Microsoft sees a need to maintain a presence in the low-cost hardware market.
Vista isn't going to do it and Windows Mobile is less than satisfying. XP is Microsofts only offering that can be squeezed onto machines that otherwise might have been exclusively Linux powered. I think this sucks for developers more than anything in that effectively Microsoft is asking them to support two platforms.
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They are keeping an OS alive because it runs on less powerful computers. Nothing new. They developed Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs to do the same thing. But, in the case of WinFLP, it was to ensure that people that buy Software Assurance on a computer can continue to pay for that assurance even after their hardware reaches "Legacy" standing.
They didn't release it to the public because it wasn't as effective as a full desktop version of Windows (although if you've used it you'll see it's more user friendly than Starter Edition) and because not enough people were buying new computers that couldn't run what they saw as the current OS.
Now with a shift towards lower powered ultra mobiles, people are buying computers that aren't really suited to run what they see as the current OS.
They are already maintaining a way to run a supported version of Windows on PCs going back to P233 with 64MB RAM because they saw a market driven reason for it. Extending the availability of XP Home just means they are recognizing a similar market in consumer space now.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
1) The hardware manufacturers make more money. Then then repay MS by not supporting other OSes.
2) The cost of the software remains low in relation to the cost of the total system. People won't notice a $200 OS buried in $1000 of hardware. But in $200 of hardware another $200 stands out.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That's a long way of setting some background; what I'm trying to say is that when a company that's enjoyed success for years decides that their success is due to some special insight or knowledge - the market corrects them. IBM thought they were the leaders in PC technology and made a turn and marched off into the distance. They didn't realize that nobody followed them until much later.
For IBM, this was the thing that changed them from being the leaders in PCs to an also-ran PC company in just a few short years. In their pride, they dictated how the future of PCs should be and ignored their market. Too bad for them; they're completely out of the PC business now.
For Microsoft, Vista is their "Microchannel" moment. They lost sight of the need to satisfy their customer's needs and decided to make some fundamental changes (baked in DRM) on their own. Now they're enjoying the result of that decision; sales of Vista are far, far lower than they expected. And those sales figures don't include all the new machines that came with Vista that have since been upgraded to XP. I know that Vista will never touch any PC I own or control.
Since there's a few smart people at Microsoft they've extended XP's life a few more years. A decent choice; better to sell the obsolete OS than lose more customers to Linux. This won't fix the real problem, though - Microsoft needs to decide which customers they're actually serving. If it's the end user then the next version of Windows is critical; another DRM infested release will spell the end. If they're actually serving corporate interests then it doesn't matter; they've failed already and we're just watching the death throes.
While Microsoft plays their games, Linux continues to evolve and improve. This is a golden opportunity for Linux on the desktop...
In my opinion the only thing Vista was properly designed to do is strip money from customers.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
They released either too soon, or too late.
If we assume that business customers are where MS's real profits come from, then Vista is a fuck-up of epic proportions. I don't know of ANY business that plans to "upgrade" to Vista. Why would they? A five-year-old PC will run XP and basic office-type appliations at full-speed (especially if those machines have 1GB of RAM or more). What does Vista offer as an improvement? Yeah, the security is better, but in a corporate setting, those machines are (hopefully) locked down via Group Policies and permissions anyway.
It's just impossible to justify in a corporate setting. Upgrade all the machines, to get performance rougly equal to what you already have. Oh, and lets not forget that quite a few peripherals don't and WON'T have Vista drivers.
Now, the next version of Windows will come on a hardware-upgrade cycle for a lot of companies, so it will probably sell better. But even then, I imagine that many companies are planning to stick with XP until it's just no longer possible to run it on new machines. And that could be a long time.
What made Linux good was not that it competed with Windows (quite successfully despite the press and the critics of both OS's). Windows techs did learn to start community websites to help each other, so Linux user mindsets have permeated the Windows side of things.
Be happy, Microsoft might be an evil entity or a tool of evil men, but at the very least, many of its users found Linux or BSD or even Darwin because of this. By the same token, competition has been good for the Linux geeks. If the arena full of evil tyrants wasn't there, they would've never received the same press they got now. Had it not been for gaming, some geeks might have never discovered they were geeks.
Microsoft was a stage in evolution, if one seeks to see it as such. They put lots of cheap computers into the homes of those who would've been too inept to make use of the various Unices. Be happy for it, is what I say. Competition has been great for Linux, and would you truly wish to have the OS that is the world's biggest target?
If those in the community decide to fight against Microsoft, they will become what they kill. Microsoft became what they killed (IBM in 87 anyone?). Don't strive to kill Microsoft's joy. Microsoft is sinking themselves. Just keep doing what we've all been doing. It works far more than aggressively fighting for ground. Remember Sun Tzu: "Any warrior can fight a battle and win, but a master wins the war before the battle is fought." Try it. Microsoft is doing admirably at shoving their own foot in their own mouth. All the rest of us have to do is just help the "lusers" in our lives learn to use something else, and make that transition less painful than it would've been for them when many of us got into Unix.
You don't have to be a "guru" or a "wizard" or "3l33t" to help someone less technically inclined. Who knows, they might be able to help elsewhere.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
On top of that it needs to be actually secure, table and reliable. It would also be nice that it be readily repairable and not self destruct at random intervals.
The only real difference between 2000 and 2008, it should have the latest drivers properly implemented.
So all I want is an OS that I will be able to use for the rest of my life, without being extorted for upgrades, without being forced to use applications I have no interest in, without being subjected to inconveniences due to ill conceived anti-piracy methods, without bugs the will never get repaired because you should buy the latest version that has those faults supposedly repaired, without having to pay more for detailed help files and, most importantly without wasting hardware performance on the OS that should be used for applications.
I gotta tell you that those 8 years have taught me one thing for sure and certain, M$ ain't the company to provide the required solution but the have certainly demonstrated time and again the problems caused when those 'withouts' are replaced by 'withs'.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Hmm. It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Vista is often criticized for its lack of killer features to justify its increased greediness. I personally think the UI's improvements are handy, but if I could have them in XP, I'd be just as happy. And I certainly couldn't justify spending $1000 more on a document handling laptop just so I can run Vista vs XP. Linux resource requirements seem to be relatively stable compared to MS operating systems. Really, only media-intensive work (eg transcoding) and "blockbuster" games are even capable of significantly loading a modern machine. For many tasks, people are now preferring to take their Moore's Law profits in money rather than performance.
Another factor might be that the GHz wall and relative difficulty of parallel programming means that there's just no perceived performance benefit to typical tasks from the newest hardware, and the benefits can be cancelled out by suboptimal software design (see again Vista benchmark results). Due to this lack of progress, people are choosing (for the first time since the eighties?) that cheaper hardware running less inefficient software is a better use of their resources.
Actually, Linux's requirements seem to be coming down in some areas. KDE4, despite having way more eyecandy is actually supposed to required less resources than KDE3. Compiz runs fine on my Celeron 1.6 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and Intel GMA laptop. Why can't Vista, with even less eye candy run at respectable speeds? You could easily have most (all?) of the UI upgrades that Vista offers on XP. Some of them you may not really want, like the completely redesigned control panel (why do they have to do it every time?). But it could all easily be done. There isn't anything revolutionary that Vista does.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It might also be a recognition that the upgrade treadmill is no longer providing much in the way of new value for the end users, compared to the nineties and early this century.
Recognition? It's a downright admission to market failure. This is not something that can be said for free software though.
The last seven years have provided all sorts of great things for free software users that were stuffed into the same modest hardware requirements. Interfaces that were functional and stable have become beautiful without excessive bloat. There are all sorts of productivity increasing features. Printer support has gone from decent to phenomenal. Media playing and transcoding was very hard to come by seven years ago, now it's common and very good. Network integration in both KDE and Gnome is astonishing and this feature alone would make it impossible for me to consider running XP outside of Parallels or some other Virtual Box. Then there are all the specialty applications. The exponentially growing Debian tree has applications for just about any purpose you can think of and it reflects an even larger body of free code.
Free software is not standing still either. People have new itches and they are scratching them so things are not going to slow down anytime soon. Besides better interfaces and specialty applications there are basic communications and sharing needs that people have. I imagine greater speech recognition, better wireless communication in general, better automation of wireless file transfer and synchronization based on location and a host of other digital life uses. Better and cheaper displays will create all sorts of information surfaces and free computing will be the first to really fill the smart house. People have made a good start with X10 type stuff but the ease of porting to ever smaller and more powerful platforms finally will make these things common.
No calls now, I'm
I used Vista for months before finally getting fed up and switching to Linux. The fact that Linux can do *more* eye candy than Vista and still run on more meagre hardware is one of hundreds of testaments to Linux's actual superiority to Windows. It infuriates me that the most we get out of Vista visual effects is a glass engine, a 3d switcher, and somewhat boring window open/close animations that requires ~ 2 GiB of RAM to do it with any measure of decent speed.
The obvious answer, of course, is that Windows is and always has been a bloated piece of shit. It becomes more apparent with each Windows release: Windows because more massive, memory intensive, and insecure, and only a minuscule amount of improved stability against a typical Linux distro, which is small, nimble, efficient, inherently secure, and extremely stable, and increases in this way on every upgrade curve.
Vista pretty much proves this. How massive is it? Did we just double the system requirements for Windows *again* like with XP? What about that whatyamacallit system: Lunix? Lanex? Linux? Whatever the hell it is. Doesn't that run on my computer with all them snazzy features Windows claims to have without being s bitch to run?
No wonder there's been a noticeable increase of Windows migration and Linux/Mac OS X adoption, even the not-so-much-technical users are starting to notice how crappy Windows is.
I just got my brother in law to install Mandriva. He's been wanting to try out Linux for quite a while now. He's not really much of a computer geek, so I tend not to talk to him much about Linux, but after reading some main stream magazines, he knew enough about Linux that he knew he wanted to give it a try. Linux really is starting to get a lot of attention. It may not be the best option in all cases, especially when you have business critical windows applications. However, for the home user, Linux is a whole lot less hassle, and requires a whole lot less resources to perform the exact same function.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Considering the ever increasing error margins ("to hell with QA, returns are cheaper since the customer has to pay shipping"), a device able to support the sticker without crumbling IS already some kind of sign of quality today.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, you're saying the gaming machine I bought in 2000 could run Vista? It was relatively top-of-the-line, though it was purchased on a student budget so it skimped in a few areas.
Let's see. Athlon Slot-A 700MHz. Voodoo3 graphics. 64MB RAM (later upgraded to 128MB). 17GB 5400rpm hard drive. 1.44 floppy! 24x CDROM reader. 250W Athlon-approved powersupply.
Minor upgrades my ass, you'd be replacing everything but the case.
Random and weird software I've written.
You've got it backwards. The market exists, the devices already exist and are selling like hotcakes - Asus is seeling EeePCs as fast as it can make them, they're selling at above RRP everywhere and others are bringing similar devices to market in the coming weeks and months. Till this week they ran Linux out of the box. That scared Microsoft into extending the life of XP and offering Asus an extra-low price. Microsoft haven't created the market, they're reacting to it.
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